Bio

The only things I’ve ever really been interested in doing are creative.

When I was very young I made models and toys. My “writing” centered on setting up vehicles and buildings and acting out an action adventure with them, and also imagining much more.

Many of my imaginations were non-narrative; they had more to do with an emotional response or wonder. Music was very good for reaching those wordless places. Feelings colored the whole world, and the world’s colors continually changed, sometimes suddenly.

I drew a lot; sometimes the line coming out of my pen was more important than the drawing itself. I built things and made things and felt a bit frustrated with what I wasn’t talented enough to build or make.

New ideas, new colors kept coming.

As I grew up I felt rudderless and clueless about what I was supposed to do with my life. I gave up on finding a lover who was passionate about me and decided to love a friend instead.

I had a job drawing lines and pasting type and printing photographs.

I had a job making mats and frames for other people’s art and made their pieces look even better.

I helped create two children. I made little movies where my toddler played the monster and stomped the toy town I built.

I had a great job where I wrote scripts, directed actors, and edited videos.

I discovered the root of my unhappiness was that I didn’t just want a friend for a lover — I needed to create something big and complex with romantic emotions. These were my first clues that my life itself was my biggest creative project.

I busted myself into little tiny pieces and left my wife and began the long, painful, sometimes ugly process of building something better out of the pieces. I wrote a lot about love and feelings, trying to figure them out. I clung to my children and tried to figure out being a father.

I had an office job that was partly about making posters and laying out documents; since that was the only part I liked, I kind of sucked at my job.

I was impoverished. I worried constantly about how I was going to pay for anything.

I loved different people and realized that many hurting people come to love to be comforted, but aren’t necessarily good at loving. I learned a lot about what people want and what they feel. It often hurt. But it reached me all the way down. It was harrowing, but I felt very alive, like I was finally using all of my emotion muscles, and I learned a lot about myself and what I was.

I began to feel stories coming out. I could imagine characters that were interesting and made sense.

I had a job building crazy things like trade show displays for MTV and Comedy Central, and painting fiberglass penguins, and building golden towers for XM Radio, and a float for Disney’s The Emperor’s New Groove.

I found a great place to live, but I still couldn’t afford life.

I got a job for a bookseller, blurbing books for their catalog. I don’t have time to read them but I can’t help it sometimes — all these great ideas, all these great minds talking to me. All this history, filling in the gaps in my education.

I felt more and more stories coming out. Sometimes an author’s words would make me see something in a whole new way, and I’d go to write down one little idea and it would turn into five paragraphs.

When I least expected it, and had stopped even looking, I found someone who loved me passionately and was also very good at loving.

Thanks largely to her, I began to believe my writing was something interesting and valuable.

You may or may not agree, but here we are anyway.